Ledona Tech

I just got DSL service via Verizon in NYC.  The DSL modem they sent me, Westell Proline 6100, acts as a gateway to the internet as well as a router (performing tasks like firewall, DHCP, port forwarding, etc…).  A little experimenting revealed that it doesn’t perform most of its routing tasks well, and some things, like dynamic DNS, just don’t work at all.

I already have a wifi router that does all these things well. So my task was to set up the Westell modem so that it passes off all duties (other than connecting to Verizon) to my router.

I played around with some of the modem settings to no avail.  I googled and found a posting saying that a similar Westell modem model, with similar problems, could be set to “bridge mode”.  While in that mode it should pass all duties to whatever internet device it is connected to.  This too did not work for me.  Verizon technical support was useless (no one I spoke to even knew what dynamic DNS is).

Finally, out of desperation, I meticulously went through all of the Westell’s configuration options.  One setting did the trick.  It has an option to set up a connected device as a DMZ host.  Luckily all external connection requests get passed to that device AND that device is assigned the external IP address.  In my case that is everything I needed.